HTMlles – Stubborn Objects: Counter-surveillance in a posthuman landscape

The terms of privacy are frequently articulated through (and on the backs of) gendered, racialized and sexualized bodies, which have historically been trapped in a violent and violating publicity through surveillance and control apparatuses. Feminist, queer, and anti-racist movements have struggled against such surveillant apparatuses (from state and non-state actors), seeking to find modes of agency and justice even as we make visible the violent borders of the public and private. Stubborn Objects works to decorporealize strategies of resistance to surveillance, sensitive to the double violence of appearing within structures of surveillance. The exhibit asks what visual regimes look like when bodies are not the focus for tracking operations? What architectures frame movements in space? What textures reveal the visible surface of the city? What non-events might come to interrupt the spaces of surveillance? This roundtable discusses the performative strategies to highlight, interrupt or displace structures of surveillance and control in the urban landscape and other contested territories.